Gripes about CD Anywhere from V Communications

July 17, 2003. Like the other two versions, this was the Personal Edition, not the Network Edition of CD Anywhere.

I was directed to un-install all the virtual CD drives, then un-install version 2.04, then reboot and install version 2.6.

Again like the other two versions, this version is not certified for use with Windows XP.

The un-install of version 2.04 was not thorough. Start -> Programs -> etc. etc. still showed all the CD Anywhere icons. I had moved them from their default location and the un-installer did not delete them. It also did not delete the programs directory in Program Files. There was still a V Communications directory with a CD Anywhere subdirectory. I renamed it to try and keep the new version from being affected by the old version. The new version however did pick up some option settings from v2.04 (no doubt from the registry). At the first boot after installing there was no icon in the system tray, which was a leftover option that user had set with version 2.04.

It seems that the option to show the CD Anywhere icon in the system tray is kept per user rather than system wide. However, while logged on as an administrator user, after turning off the option, the icon remained. Perhaps it only takes effect at the next logon.

I created new virtual CD drives and rebooted without incident. I assigned disk images to each of the CD drives and rebooted. This time, every one of the programs in a virtual CD started automatically. No doubt this is related to the AutoPlay option for the virtual CDs. It only happened once though, subsequent re-starts did not cause the programs in the virtual CD drives to automatically run when a user logged on.

As with v2.04, the icons for the images in the CD Manager application are all black (see example at right). The computer was using 16 bit color mode.

At first, there were no problems of losing virtual CD drives or connections between the virtual CD drives and the hard disk CD images. That didn't last long however. Same cdiInsertDisk error as with version 2.04 (last error message below).

The big new problem with version 2.60 however involves auto-run. Apparently the product keeps track of whether auto-run is enabled for a virtual CD-ROM drive on a user basis and not system wide. The Windows XP computer has multiple users defined to it. The virtual CDs were set up from an administrative user. All the virtual CD drives hold programs, none are audio CDs. When you log on as a restricted user all the programs in all the virtual CD drives start up immediately.

OK, so I'll just change the virtual CD drive definition to turn off auto-run. Nope, doesn't work. The program says "You should uninstall then install the drive again or reboot to apply autorun feature changes" (shown here at the right). All it does is hang for a while and then unload the CD image file from the virtual CD-ROM drive.

When you log on as a different administrative user than the one that installed the virtual CD drives, the results are inconsistent. Once, all the programs auto-played as soon as the user logged on. A couple times, only one of the programs auto-played at logon time.

I called technical support. They never heard of a problem with multiple programs running automatically as soon as you logon.

The fountain of error messages is worse with v2.60 than it was with version 2.04. An excerpt is shown below:

And a documentation problem. When you copy a CD to the hard drive, the last window has a checkbox for "assign volume file names automatically". What is this? Clicking the Help button in the Window provides no help, there is no documentation about it. This same window has an option for image file size where you enter a number from 1 to 2,047. What image file size? Nothing in the program Help about this either.

FYI: This version does not use CDDB. When a restricted user logged on there were no Faircom errors.

July 29, 2003.
Technical Support has been of no use at all in solving these problems. The majority of their responses are try a different version of the program. It is the computer equivalent of "go away kid don't bother me". These responses are why there are gripes on this page for three different versions of CD Anywhere. Not once have they commented in any way on an error message or an error code and what it means or what to do about it.

After the above problems I contact them again by phone. They were able to re-create the problem of the programs installed in the virtual CD drives all running at boot time when you log on as a Windows XP user other than the one that installed the software and installed the virtual CD drives. I also told them of a problem with the CD images on disk getting detached from the virtual CD drive and sent them an error message and an error code from when this happened.

A week and a half after they re-created the problem, I had not heard back from them and the problem description on their web site had not been updated. I contact them again and, true to form, they said to try a different version of the software. It seems this is their only response, regardless of the problem. Adding insult to injury, they forgot what the problem was. Below is their response:

The problem I think you are referring about (I don't really remember us discussing this) is the images getting knocked out of the virtual drives at reboot. We had this problem on some machines with CDA 2.04 but CDA 2.5 fixed it. Perhaps it has come back with CDA 2.6? Have you tried CDA 2.5? I see you started with 2.04. Perhaps you should uninstall 2.6 completely and try 2.5? Hopefully this will take care of the issue, and give you the same functionality. If this does work then I will list CDA 2.6 as having the detaching images bug.

I asked for my money back. If they can't even track our communications, further discussion is probably a waste of time.

July 31, 2003. It turns out the un-install instructions I was given were not complete. Its not enough to uninstall the virtual CD-ROM drives, get out of CD Anywhere, un-install CD Anywhere and reboot. There is also a CDAcleaner program that you have to run after un-installing the product. Amazing what you find out from tech support after asking for your money back. That's not all, you are also supposed to delete the folder where the product lives (I did this on my own) and empty the recycle bin. This is from a FAQ on Uninstalling CD Anywhere.

August 1, 2003. I asked tech support about the problem with all the programs in virtual CD drives running automatically at boot time. They said:
"That has been noted, but probably won't be address by the developers until v3"
I had to ask, this was not volunteered.

Version 2.04.005 With Windows XP SP1

July 13, 2003. Personal Edition (as opposed to the Network Edition) As before, version 2.04 was not certified to work with Windows XP.

The install did something I'd never seen before - hang, sort of. It said "Configuring system. This can take up to several minutes. Please wait". It took much more than several minutes. About thirty minutes or so. Watching it with Task Manager, the cpu usage was all over the map - periods of quiet and high activity interspersed. The cpu was never idle or over-worked for long periods. It kept varying.

After installing the product, I rebooted the machine many times. Sometimes when it boots there is an error message window that says "Cannot automatically add the virtual CD-ROM drive X:\". This is not a fatal error, I was able to use the CD Manager application to re-create the virtual CD drive definition and re-assign the hard disk image of the CD to it.

However this keeps happening over and over and over. I had created six virtual CD drives. Each time the computer starts up, a random number of them are available. Most of them do not appear most of the time. Its like a lottery game - boot the computer and guess which virtual CD drives will be available this time. What's going on?

Certainly the product must keep a log of errors, somewhere. CD Anywhere does not write errors to any of the three Windows XP system logs. Needless to say the error message window, shown here, does not contain detailed information on the problem (here is that lazy theme again). There is a file, however, called cdawman.log in the directory where CD Anywhere is installed and it appears to be a log file (the documentation does not mention a log file). This file shows many cdiAddDrive errors with an error code of 0x2. There was also one instance of a cdiInsertDisk error with an error code of 0x20.

The product accepts commands, so perhaps I could make a batch file to force the creation of the necessary virtual CD drive just before running the application program that uses it. Then again, by this time, I'd rather get my money back. It does not seem to have all the XP related kinks worked out.

Still, with untold hours wasted on this already, I made batch files. Needless to say the documentation about this in the PDF file that ships with the product contains more than its share of mistakes. However, I'm familiar with Windows batch files and debugged it myself. I could command it to allocate a virtual CD-ROM drive and also to insert the hard disk image of a CD into the virtual CD-ROM drive. That worked. Sometimes. Not all the time. Now I was getting new errors. For example:

cdiAddDrive V:\ error: 0x1
cdiAddDrive V:\ error: 0xB7
cdiInsertDisk V:\ error: 0x1 path: C:\xxxx.CDI
cdiInsertDisk V:\ error: 0x20 path: C:\xxxx.CDI

A virtual fountain of error messages.

These error numbers do not correspond with the errors in the PDF format User Guide. The User Guide only mentions errors numbered 1 through 10. All the errors I got started with 0x (a standard meaning the following characters are hexadecimal). If 0x1 is the same as error 1 in the User Guide, then its a general error. Not too useful. Lazy again.

Adding insult to injury, in 16 bit color mode, the icons for the images in the CD Manager application are all black. Initially, when I started using the program they were in color.

I submitted a tech support request to the vendor. A while later, it occurred to me to add details on these new errors. The V-Com web site was broken however, couldn't even load the home page. This persisted for a few hours.

A few months ago, the vendor had mentioned a new release was in the works, 2.6. Nowhere on their web site does it say what the current version of the product is.

Version 2.50.005 With Windows XP SP1

March 2003. My problems with CD Anywhere started before it even ran once. I got an error typing in the serial number - not a good sign. The serial number is not one number but its divided up into sections. Normally when a company does this each section on the input window only allows the correct number of characters. Not with CD Anywhere. There is an input box for a section of the serial number where you can enter more digits than it allows. You get to the end of typing in the serial number and the Next button is grayed out. If the company is lazy about this...

Speaking of lazy, you get the warning shown here on the right when installing CD Anywhere under Windows XP. The product documentation on the vendor web site said that it works under XP, they just haven't bothered certifying it.

CD Anywhere is installed using Install Shield. At some point during the install, it wanted to access the Internet (thanks to ZoneAlarm I know this). Why? It didn't say why. It could be a form of Spyware.

Then came my major problem. When a restricted XP user logs on, there are two error messages about Faircom errors. When an administrator logs on, no errors. It was not at all obvious what software was even putting out the errors. There is no obvious link between CD Anywhere and Faircom. The vendor, V communications, has nothing on their web site at all about Faircom. I had just installed a bunch of programs, so any one of them could have been the problem. The problem though was with CD Anywhere, which was not well tested under Windows XP.

Searching the web with Google turned up a program that competes with CD Anywhere, but has much better online technical support. It is called Virtual CD and this Knowledge Base article on their web site pinpointed my problem.

Faircom is a software company whose software is embedded in other software. CD Anywhere was using it for something related to CDDB. I couldn't care less about CDDB. The problem was security related and had to do with writing to a specific directory. The Home Edition of Windows XP does not allow a restricted user to be granted authority to read or write a single directory. So I couldn't directly attack the root cause of the problem.

Good news, you can disable CDDB usage in CD Anywhere. Bad news, it did not fix my problem. Then I disabled CDDB again, rebooted and moved the CDDB cache folder. It soon got re-created and the error messages again started appearing every time a restricted user logged on.

V Communications technical support said that the next release will fix the problem. Heard that one before. They also said the previous release did not have the problem and sent me a copy of version 2.04.

Months after the problem with Faircom and V Communications admitting it is a problem and saying they were working on it, there is nothing about it in the tech support section of their web site. Lazy and sloppy seems to be the over-riding theme here. Especially lazy, as any restricted XP user would have suffered the same problem. It seems the product was not tested well before it shipped.

FYI: A free program that competes with CD Anywhere is Hekko Virtual CD which can be obtained from My Web Attack. The vendor is Circle of One Software

FYI: Read about another free Virtual CD Drives program, from Microsoft in the Langa List from Fred Langa, November 13, 2003.

FYI: Version 2.03 was the first release of CD Anywhere to support XP. I was not dealing with brand new code.

FYI: Tech support from V Communications is Monday-Friday 9 to 5, PST. 408-965-4018

FYI: CD Anywhere may have wasted more of my time that any other software on this web site. So much time debugging it, so little time using it.

CD Anywhere

Version 2.60.008 With Windows XP SP1

Version 2.04.005 With Windows XP SP1

Version 2.50.005 With Windows XP SP1